


Scholarships and other related stressors

by Melime



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Law Students, Alternate Universe - Lawyers, Gen, Take Your Fandom to Work Day, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 17:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7061761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a law student was already hard enough without having an impossible scholarship adviser to deal with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scholarships and other related stressors

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Bolsas e outros estressores relacionados](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7067761) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> Disclaimer (wow I haven't done this in a long while): I'm a 6th year law student and have a teaching scholarship, and this, as it was the point of the challenge, is based on my experiences. However, all characters and situations presented here are entirely fictional (even though at times very close to what really happened), and specially with the criminal cases only the broadest of details (and only those not affected by confidentiality) were used as an inspiration. Please do not make any conclusions about real people, cases, and situations based on this. Also, the professor is a fictional character, he isn't my adviser _at all_ , any coincidence between the two is exactly that, a coincidence.
> 
> On another note, in this AU everybody is the same age and at the last year of a law school in Brazil, also, Rodney and Jeannie are twins here. There are brief mentions of crimes (only the name of the crime is said, not any description of the acts), and people being defended of accusations of those crimes, also some people express misogynistic/racist/homophobic opinions but that's criticized within the story, so if you may have a problem with that, please don't read. There's some background McShep but this is still a gen story. Also, this is very self-indulgent and my only defense is that I'm tired and stressed and I think I failed the bar exam, don't take this serious, I just thought it would be funny if Rodney had to deal with my boss and thus this was born.

Two weeks after being granted his scholarship, Rodney began to wonder if there was any way to get away with murdering his adviser. His odds were good if he managed to convince John to go along with it, which he probably could. He mentally went through all the other interns from the Program for Facing Vulnerability in Prison Environments, trying to figure out if they would be pro or against his plan. John was a strong maybe in the pro column; Ronon was pro for sure; Teyla would be against on principle even though she also hated the guy; Radek could go either way; Elizabeth would be against; Aiden would be pro; Sam wouldn’t do anything to stop them but she probably wouldn’t help either; same with Evan; Jennifer would do everything she could to stop them and then she would go to the police; Carson would oppose on the grounds that all life has value; and Jeannie would try to change his mind.

All in all, he was pretty sure he could gather the necessary support, and, being the genius that he knew he was, he could also plan it well enough so it would be one of the crimes the police never bothers solving. He sighed. Sure, he wouldn’t actually kill the idiot, but it was fun to think he could leave his options open. Instead, he texted John, ‘We have a hearing tomorrow morning, 10:15’.

The answer came almost immediately, ‘No we don’t, I set up push notifications for all our cases’.

Rodney felt again the urge to hit his head against the wall. Except his brain was too valuable so maybe he should just hit the professor’s head. ‘New case, series of thefts and home invasions, some drugs involved, we actually know the guy, he’s the one that’s always asking us for money.’

‘Why are we just learning of this now?’

‘Do I really have to say it? The professor’s an idiot. But we got to trade away one case, my pick.’

‘Which one did you choose? Please tell me it was Lucius.’

‘Of course it was Lucius, who would want to defend a rapist?’

‘I knew I was right in picking you as my partner. Are you coming over tonight? I’m downloading the new Doctor Who’

Rodney smiled involuntarily at the screen. At least talking to John had a way of making things better. ‘Throw in some pizza and I’m in’

\---

“What the fuck just happened?” Rodney asked to John, completely ignoring their client.

“I’m gonna kill that witness,” the client said, far too cheery.

“Shut up!” the said at the same time.

“Please, we explained this to you, if you threaten to kill a witness, you’ll go to jail,” John said, for what was probably the thirtieth time since just before the hearing started.

“They let me sleep in jail once, they even gave me a mattress. That cop that is my friend let me go there, he even gave me a ride in his police car.”

Rodney slapped his forehead. “Please, take me out of here before I do something near armed guards that will get all of us in trouble,” he told John.

“Right, you,” he said, pointing at their client, “can go home, and for future reference, pot does count as a drug when we ask you to come sober.” And then, whispering just to Rodney, “Let’s go before he tries again to make us ask if the witness is gay.”

Rodney whispered back. “Do you think we should tell him?”

John laughed. “No way. Although let’s see if we can trade away this case too.”

\---

Elizabeth arrived with Sam, and they both sat down frustrated.

“John, Rodney, I have to ask…” Elizabeth started.

“Was he high?” Rodney asked.

“Was he threatening the witness?” John said in turn.

“Telling his own defense to stop asking questions that were actually helping his case?”

“Talking to the witnesses before the hearing?”

“Insisting the arresting officers were actually his best pals?”

“Asking for money for his wife, his daughter and his grandson?”

Elizabeth raised a hand to stop them. “So you knew how much trouble he was?”

Sam added, “You forgot the part where he insisted we asked if the witness, and I quote, ‘was there to spread his legs or fuck…’ a word that I’m too polite to say.”

“Oh, yeah, for some reason he kept insisting we tried to prove the witness was gay at the other hearing too,” John agreed.

“But you can’t say the case you traded us is easy, I’m sure this Michael guy is also a handful,” Rodney said.

“I heard that in other, better organized law schools, students aren’t forced by their adviser’s to keep trading their cases and instead actually see them to the end,” Elizabeth commented offhandedly.

“I don’t believe that, this course is only six years, all the others are five, when did you ever see a case end so fast?” Rodney said.

\---

Teyla grabbed the monitor even harder, as the professor tried to take it from her.

“Please, you shouldn’t be carrying something this heavy, leave the monitors for the boys, take a keyboard or something,” the professor said.

“I’m perfectly capable of carrying this, thank you,” she said in an acidic voice, and pulled the monitor from his hands, taking it with her to the new room they were setting.

Rodney moved Teyla to a strong maybe in his mental list of who would help him murder they adviser.

After the professor explained to them they should ‘install’ the computers on a room with no electric sockets but they should still connect all the cables because the computers needed to be in working order, Rodney also moved Radek from a maybe to a pro murder position.

\---

“Oh, Rodney, Jeannie, you two are Canadian, right?” the professor asked one day during a meeting.

Rodney looked around. “Yes, we both are,” he answered cautiously.

“Great! So I need you to translate all of website to French by tomorrow.”

“I don’t speak French,” Jeannie said, while Rodney was still too surprised to answer.

“Of course you do, you are Canadian.”

“We were both two years old when we moved here. And we weren’t even born in the French speaking portion of Canada!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’m sure you can do it, oh, and Teyla can help you. You are half-African or something, aren’t you Teyla? They speak French in Africa. Actually, Teyla, why don’t you take this opportunity to translate it to German, Spanish, and Italian too?”

They all looked at each other, unsure as to how to even respond to that.

“With all due respect, professor, no, they won’t be doing any of that,” John said before the situation escalated further. As it was, the professor was already lucky Teyla was too shocked to react.

“But…”

“That’s a no, professor. Go to the linguistics department of the university if you want translator, but I doubt they’ll give you the time of the day.”

Rodney moved Teyla again, this time to the pro murdering list. At this rate, the professor would be dead inside of a month.

\---

Ronon arrived first from their hearing, and gathered everyone around the meeting table. “Whatever you do, don’t ask Teyla about the hearing.”

“Why, what happened?” Elizabeth asked.

“The opposing lawyer manipulated the kids and tried to turn them against their mother, and then he tried to trick her into saying she lied about the abuse, tried to use her dead son to frame her for some fake shit. Teyla punched him.”

“Is he alright?” Elizabeth asked at the same time John asked, “Were there any witnesses?”

Ronon shrugged. “Broken nose, just me and the client, but both the lawyer and that child molester lost all credibility with the judge, so I think we’ll be fine.”

\---

John shook Rodney slightly, calling his name softly. Rodney woke up scared, and looked around, searching for their colleagues.

“They all left already. You fell asleep during the formal requisites of a criminal appeal.”

“I’m gonna kill that bastard, making me work ten hours a day when he knows we have the bar exam next week.”

John smiled fondly. “Yeah, and I’ll help you ditch the body. But first you need to get some sleep.”

“Don’t you wish scholarships counted as jobs?”

“But then they would have to give us all those pesky labor rights, including minimum wage, and you know they would never do that. Wanna stay over? Ronon said he was staying at Teyla’s today.”

Rodney shrugged. He was too tired to do anything else today, but that also included taking a bus home. “Sure. I just feel like sleeping though, the professor kept me working all night for three days straight.”

“Come on, then. I’ll even let you steal some of the pillows.”

\---

“Rodney, you are a hacker, right? I need your help setting up an e-mail account,” the professor said one day, while Rodney was already doing five different things at the same time.

Rodney gave John his best ‘I’m surrounded by idiots’ look, and opened Gmail. “Alright, I’ll need your date of birth.”

“My what?”

“Date of birth. The day you were born.”

“Alright, then put that in.”

“I don’t know when you were born.”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you please just type here the day you were born?”

“Where?”

“Here where it says date of birth.”

“Right, and what do I put here?”

“Your date of birth!”

“Mine?”

“Well, it’s your e-mail, isn’t it?”

Rodney seriously considered breaking the monitor against the professor’s head, but instead he just said, “And you’ll need a password.”

“A what?”

“A password.”

“Whose password?”

“Yours.”

“What’s my password?”

“How am I supposed to know? Just pick something!”

“What do you mean?”

“You can choose a password, anything you want.”

“What should I choose?”

“I don’t know! It’s your password! Just pick something you’ll remember!”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Just pick a damn password, nothing can be worse than choosing the name of a project as the password for that project’s e-mail.”

“Right. But what should I choose?”

Rodney got up. “You know what? You sit here and think about that, when you are done just click create here.”

\---

“Hey, did you hear? The ethics professor tried to argue with Kate that lesbians are safer than straight women because they don’t have contact with men. He even said that lesbians being killed is something that just happens on TV,” Sam said as they were waiting for a meeting to start.

“Is that the same professor that keeps equating muslims to ISIS?” John asked.

“And the same that thinks everybody should be forced to serve in the army for one year minimum?” Ronon asked.

“And the same that tried to say that twenty eight years isn’t young for a Constitution?” Rodney asked.

“And the same that said this democracy wasn’t young and fragile despite our history of multiple dictatorships?” Teyla asked.

Sam just nodded. “Yes, now we can add ‘straight man that thinks he knows more about violence against lesbians than an actual lesbian’ to the list.”

“It could have been worse,” John commented. “Remember when our civil practice professor proposed a threesome to Rodney and Jeannie when he found out they were twins?”

Rodney tossed a folder at his head from across the room. “We were never going to bring that up again!”

\---

“Rodney, did you tell the professor that wearing a seatbelt was option in this town?” Elizabeth asked angrily.

“Yes, I did,” Rodney answered far too smug.

“Why would you do that? Don’t tell me you don’t know how important they are?”

“Oh, I know. I was just testing how much of an idiot he was. Did you see how he drives? Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll get himself killed.”

“Rodney!”

“Fine, but if you want him to live all that much, then you convince him he needs that. The guy was holding the seatbelt in front of his chest every time he saw a cop before I told him that, so I’m not to blame if he dies, at most I’m responsible for making him get fined.”

\---

“I don’t understand, you didn’t tell me I shouldn’t say that,” said Michael.

“How much of an idiot are you?” Rodney yelled, and John had to hold him back.

“Michael, we assumed that you knew better than to confess, especially in such a… graphic way.”

“But it’s the truth, was I not supposed to tell the truth? It’s not my fault if babies cry so beautifully that I just get this compulsion to hurt them.”

“Please shut up now,” Rodney said. “Now how the hell are we supposed to defend this case? The professor isn’t even here this week.”

“Rodney, we are defense, since the case can’t move forward without our defense, I suggest we ignore this deadline and hand this in next week.”

“Isn’t that unethical?”

“More unethical than going to a romantic getaway in Spain with your boyfriend and leaving two sixth year students to deal with a hearing?”

“Touché.”

\---

They all finished the bar exam around the same time, which was the moment the alarm hang and they were forced to turn it in. Rodney tripped over his own feet and needed Ronon’s help to get out of the room, and when Radek bumped on them on his way out, Ronon decided to just carry them both out of there. John and Jeannie were leaning on each other, and Jeannie pulled Jennifer to walk along with them. Aiden seemed completely lost when he left his room, and had to be taken by Carson on his way out.

All in all, everybody was so lost and disoriented that if it wasn’t for Elizabeth and Teyla coordinating the group, they might have all wondered the streets until they ended up in random places around the city.

Instead, they went to John and Ronon’s apartment, and somewhere along the stairs Sam pulled along her friends from her former college. Rodney was almost sure he knew all of those people, but he was even surer that he didn’t care. He couldn’t even find enough brain power to unlock the door, let alone count how many people entered the apartment.

They had a plan: get together after the exam, make some popcorn, drink as much beer as they could, and maybe watch some silly movies (Galaxy Quest was the first on the list, with seven votes in favor). Reality had other plans: they sat around the living room, mostly on the floor since there wasn’t enough place for seventeen people to sit. When they woke up the following day, they might be confused as to why they were all sleeping together on the floor with unpopped popcorn spread all around them, and with the TV turned on, but on the agricultural auction channel and on mute, and using their books as pillows, but for the time being, they didn’t have enough brain power to care.


End file.
